Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg

  When the stragglers finally made it out of the canyon, Brautigan tapped his pocket watch. “We’ve been here [. . .] thirty-five minutes,” he said. “Time to have a game of cribbage.” He tossed Rip a can of beer. “Here—we saved you laggards a brew to share.” Back at the Dunn’s place in Monterey, Richard related his adventures with the Blunder Brothers. Weaving Willard into the fantasy, he concocted a fable about “capturing the dreaded water snakes of Big Sur.” It was all in fun, but Keith Abbott felt “under the fantasy was a sour feeling, as if Price and Bruce hadn’t come up to the mark.”

  Richard Brautigan arrived in Boston just before Halloween, when Delacorte published his big three-in-one book. Sam Lawrence owned a fashionable brownstone townhouse on Beacon Hill, “very unlike the hippie atmosphere,” and when Brautigan came to visit, Lawrence remembered him dropping to his knees and staring at the floor.

  “What are you doing down there?” Sam demanded.

  “This is real pine,” Richard muttered in awe. “Real pine.”

  To Sam Lawrence such domestic refinements were no big deal. His house had the original pine floors with “an orangy, lemon patina.” Richard reminded Sam that neither Edmund Shea nor Erik Weber had been paid for their photographs on the Delacorte and Delta editions of his books. Lawrence promised to take care of the matter. Weber was still in India, so Sam would have Roz Barrow send the check to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Richard was headed in the morning.

  When Richard returned to visit Ron Loewinsohn in Cambridge, he came across a green and white pinback button advertising an alternative educational institution at the Grolier Book Shop, the oldest and best-known literary bookstore at Harvard. Sam Lawrence introduced Brautigan to the owner, Gordon Cairnie, an early supporter of his work. “He always had Richard’s books,” Lawrence said. “Even the early ones.” The pins were on sale to benefit eight little storefront establishments located all around the Cambridge area, collectively called the Trout Fishing in America School. Founded by Peter Miller, a Williams College graduate (a second-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), with five other like-minded academics, the experimental school provided a learning environment where kids who didn’t particularly like formal academics could earn a high school diploma. The curriculum ran from English, math, and science to criminology, theories of revolution, and motorcycle repair. Tuition was $10 a month.

  Brautigan got hold of Miller’s phone number and called him up. “I heard you named a school after my book,” he said. Peter Miller “was shocked to hear from the guy.”

  “I want some pins,” Richard told him. “Saw some pins.” Miller said the school sold the pins to earn extra money. Brautigan asked to come over and buy a few, and soon after, he showed up with Ron Loewinsohn. Richard told Peter about his upcoming reading at Harvard. Brautigan became a benefactor of the school named for his novel. “He was great,” Miller recalled. “When his book came out, he would send us a box of books, which we would sell. We didn’t have any money.” From time to time, Richard visited one of the eight Trout Fishing schools. “He would come,” Peter Miller said, “he’d sit there all afternoon. He could find somebody who was real shy who he’d end up talking to. It was very sweet.”

  In and out of Cambridge for book signings and other business prior to his reading, Brautigan stayed with Peter Miller and his girlfriend, Kat, in their apartment on Broadway near Harvard Yard. Richard’s presence caused immediate tension on the domestic front. “He was murder on anyone’s girlfriend,” Peter remembered. “It only took him a moment to get jealous. He wanted real attention.”

  A big parade for Trout Fishing in America, Inc., on the first day of November provided a happy moment. Around fifty students, teachers, and parents marched along Massachusetts Avenue through Central and Harvard Squares to Cambridge Common, where they gathered for a rock concert by three local groups: Peace, Catfish Black, and Cloud. They carried signs; banners; red, yellow, and blue balloons; and large staff-mounted papier-mâché fish. The parade included a pair of balloon-decorated motorcyclists, two guys running for the city council, and a cheetah named Natasha riding in the backseat of a battered station wagon. Recalling Brautigan’s happy participation, Peter Miller said, “He got in it, walking down the street. It was great. It was the sweetest side of the sixties.”

  Richard went with Peter Miller on a return trip to Walden Pond, along with John Stickney, a visiting Life magazine reporter, who had volunteered to teach a journalism course at Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan knew what to expect from his previous sojourn with Valerie and expressed dismay at all the litter strewn around. “Where the hell are all the trash bins?” he fumed. “What would Henry David Thoreau think if he could see this place now?” Pointing at a discarded beer bottle lying submerged on the bottom, Richard calmed his indignation with wit. “Look there! Right below the surface. A glass-backed trout is sleeping.”

  By the time of Richard’s reading at Harvard, he “almost had a room” in Peter Miller’s apartment, having stayed there “four or five times.” Brautigan told Miller of his plans to write a history of the Confederate side in the Civil War. “We didn’t have a dime,” Peter said. “So he would say, ‘Come on, let’s spend this money,’ and we go to the public market and buy five bags of groceries and fill up all the cupboards.”

  Richard Brautigan was “honored” to be reading at Harvard, as Peter Miller recalled. “I’m going to read at Harvard,” Richard announced to the students at the Trout Fishing in America School, “but I want you all to come. The whole school.” When Brautigan mounted the podium in the “neoclassical lecture hall,” they were all there. “Twenty-five or thirty of ’em,” Peter Miller said. “Little ones, short ones, tall ones, fat ones, all went and got onstage. Very ragtag.”

  The Harvard students in the audience looked equally ragtag. John Stickney described them as “the hirsute, sueded, fadded, and fringed crowd of neo-surrealistic young people.” At one point during the reading, a cat wandered onto the stage, stared curiously at the poet, and sat at his feet. Richard swigged chablis from a gallon jug and read his poetry for about half an hour before jumping down, amid shouts for more, inviting the crowd to take his place onstage.

  Brautigan urged his fans to come up and read their favorite work, either his poetry or anyone else’s. Numbers of students took up the challenge, reading all manner of poems and even a political manifesto. Upon hearing an absurd newspaper article, Richard clapped his hands in delight. Someone began playing a blues harmonica into the microphone, and couples started dancing in the aisles. “I love chaos,” Brautigan declared.

  At one point, Richard suggested to the students that they read “Love Poem” over and over as it was done on his recording. Several of them accepted his invitation, experimenting with different voices and inflections. Sarah Ulerick, a Radcliffe freshman, read the poem with a Southern drawl. She charmed Richard, and later they walked together across Harvard Yard toward the reception, talking in fake German accents. Brautigan knew he’d score tonight. “I’d like to get to know you better,” he said.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Do you use contraceptives?”

  When she said “No,” he lost interest and drifted on to other possibilities. His paycheck for the evening came to $400.

  Another attempted pickup during his time in Cambridge didn’t end quite so politely. Brautigan was drunk, out on the town with Peter Miller, and asked a young woman to come home with him. When she refused, Richard “got real pissed” and kicked a dent in the front door of her car. According to Miller, Brautigan “threw some money on the ground and walked away from it. It was not his greatest moment.”

  Richard took great pleasure in being hailed as a poetry hero on the Harvard campus. His happy mood dampened when friends in the know pointed out a discrepancy between the just-published Delta edition of Trout Fishing in America and the original Four Seasons Foundation printing. Brautigan had decreed that both editions be identical. The Fo
ur Seasons’ press plates had been purchased to facilitate this plan, but the new edition was ever-so-slightly different. Pages 42 and 77 of the original edition had included the facsimile signature of Trout Fishing in America, written in Richard’s distinctive crabbed hand. On the same pages of the new Delta printing, the two signatures were conspicuously absent. The book had already gone into a second printing, and fifty thousand copies had been shipped to bookstores across the country.

  An “extremely unhappy” Brautigan telephoned Helen Brann to complain about the situation. She wasted no time expressing her displeasure to Sam Lawrence. Richard insisted that “the dropping of this signature changes the entire meaning of both these chapters, not only in structure, but continuity of feeling.” He considered it a breach of his contract.

  Two days later, Richard contacted Helen with a suggestion for how Delta might rectify their error. He wanted the publisher to run ads “as simple as possible, pointing out the omission” and instructing readers to go to a bookstore and get stickers bearing Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America” signature, which could then be pasted into the appropriate spots in the novel. Richard knew this would be expensive. As it was the printers’ fault, they should bear all the costs of such an enterprise.

  Soon after, Peter Miller, his girlfriend, Kat, and John Stickney saw Brautigan off to Buffalo. Stickney talked about writing an article on Brautigan for Life, and Richard instructed him to give Helen Brann a call. Peter and the Trout Fishing school gang headed up to Vermont for Thanksgiving. Richard spent the holiday at the home of Bob and Bobbie Creeley in Eden, New York, a small town about fifteen miles south of Buffalo. He discussed the problem of the missing Trout Fishing signatures with the Creeleys, who convinced him the bookstore sticker notion would never fly due to the prohibitive costs involved. Bobbie came up with a simpler solution.

  She proposed a long thin newspaper ad running the full length of the page, a column of Richard’s repeated Trout Fishing in America signatures. The short text, written by Bobbie, warned those who bought the novel of the defect on pages 42 and 77. “Please cut out and paste where necessary. The extras are for your friends. P.S. Congratulations! You have one of 50,000 collector’s items.” Brautigan suggested Bobbie Creeley be sent “a size 12 navy blue maxi coat” as payment for her freelance copy writing,

  Bobbie never got her coat. In the end, the problem was solved by Dell designer Rosalie Barrow. The resourceful Roz came up with a number of rubber stamps reproducing Richard’s Trout Fishing in America signature. She mailed these to all Dell warehouses across the country, instructing the recipients to stamp the missing signatures on the appropriate pages. “The line should be stamped in black ink and kept clean.” This fix involved only Delta copies not yet shipped, creating two future categories of collectible books, those with the stamped signature and copies that had none.

  “Warmly received,” Brautigan appeared before a “packed hall” at SUNY Buffalo. John Barth wrote, “The campus prided itself, in those years of antiwar sit-ins and teargassing riot police, on being ‘the Berkeley of the East.’” Richard brought along Edmund Shea’s punctuation slides and had a reel-to-reel tape recorder set up beside the lectern. After being introduced by Barth, Brautigan greeted his audience, “pushed the Play button [. . .] and disappeared into the auditorium’s projection booth.” While everyone listened to the tapes recorded for Richard’s Zapple album, “the invisible author projected slides of giant punctuation marks: five or ten minutes each of a comma, a semicolon, a period,” which John Barth thought were “entirely without bearing on the taped recitation.” This went on “for a very long three-quarters of an hour.”

  Robert Creeley, also in the auditorium, felt it “was very charming.” Barth held the opinion that “had it been anybody but Brautigan, that audience would never have sat still for it.” Even Creeley believed the students really “wanted him to read.” Barth found the whole affair “eye-glazing.” When the tape came to an end, a “beaming” Brautigan reappeared and “gestured grandly toward the tape machine.”

  “There you have it, folks,” Richard announced, “the twentieth century.”

  Hearing this, one of John Barth’s “seriously avant-garde graduate students” leaned toward him and quipped, “Yup, about 1913.” For this performance, Brautigan was again paid $400.

  In San Francisco, Richard got back together again with Valerie on the first of December. September had been a rough time for both of them. They had been mostly apart for the past couple months. He told Valerie he’d cried himself to sleep every night in September, dreaming of her continuously, kissing and loving her in his troubled slumber. Hoping to resume their relationship, Brautigan took her shopping at I. Magnin’s, an upscale department store, and bought her “a wonderful [Burberry-style] full-length tan overcoat.”

  They went to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which immediately became Brautigan’s favorite film. Flattered by all this attention, Valerie “responded totally.” She had been feeling “so horny, hurt, alone,” and after a “long drunken evening at Enrico’s” they staggered up the hill to her apartment for passionate lovemaking. The next day, one of her neighbors asked Valerie if she’d heard someone “freaking out” in the middle of the night. Estes didn’t know how to reply.

  Early December brought an announcement from New York of a “free” Bay Area concert by the Rolling Stones, at the conclusion of their eighteen-venue Let It Bleed U.S.A. tour, a “thank-you gift” for their American fans. The Stones began touring two months after Woodstock. They played twin evening shows in Oakland in November, charging ticket prices double those of other leading bands, such as the Doors. Acting through the Grateful Dead, the Stones management contacted the Diggers. The Peters, Berg and Coyote, suggested a multiple-stage event in Golden Gate Park, to “ensure a collaborative frame of reference and minimize divisions between the community and its entertainers.” This collective approach didn’t sit well with the Stones. Their manager, using Emmett Grogan as a go-between, got in touch with the Hells Angels, saying the Rolling Stones “wanted to do something for the people.” In exchange for a hundred cases of beer, the Angels agreed to act as “security” at the proposed concert.

  After the city denied the band use of Golden Gate Park, the location for the event, scheduled for Saturday, December 6, changed twice more in a three-day period. Finally, on Friday, twenty-four hours before the start of the concert, the Stones announced the event would take place at the Altamont Speedway, in the bare rolling hills near Livermore in Alameda County on the east side of the Bay. Hells Angel Bill Fritsch called the place “a goddamn, fucking, bereft pasture. In the middle of nothin’.” Numbers of wrecked stock cars lay scattered around the old track. Sweet Willie Tumbleweed described the barren location: “Couple barbed wire fences. Cow shit. Not even a barn.” Thousands of eager fans waited through the night for the gates to open at seven on Saturday morning.

  Thousands more joined them as the day progressed. By the time the music started, over four hundred thousand people were in attendance. Richard and Valerie joined the vast crowd. They needed a ride and inveigled Lew Welch and Magda Cregg to take the long way round and swing through Frisco to pick them up on their way from Marin City. “We had to park miles away,” Magda recalled. As they walked along over the empty golden hills, joining the approaching throng, people began recognizing Brautigan and called out, “Hey, Richard! Richard! Richard!”

  “He was feted everywhere,” Cregg said, “and this made him feel very good.”

  “What a sweet California morning,” Richard Brautigan remarked amid the adulation.

  Once they arrived at the performance area—where hot air balloons soared overhead, tie-dyed banners waved in the wind, and a four-foot stage (built for an earlier location and transported here the night before) stood surrounded by three-story-high scaffolding hung with huge speakers and dozens of lights—the two couples separated. Lew and Magda didn’t see Richard and Valerie again for months. Brautigan, cashing
in on his celebrity status and friendship with the Hells Angels (particularly Bill Fritsch), went backstage, where the other illustrious gathered.

  Owsley Stanley, the acid mogul, chatted with the organizers of the Woodstock Festival. Survivors of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement mingled with the rock aristocracy of San Francisco. Timothy Leary, between court dates, was there with his wife, Rosemary. Emmett Grogan roared in on his “chopped red Harley fandango ’74.” No love lost between Grogan and Leary, the psychedelic guru considered the founder of the Diggers “a junkie street-warrior, darling of the chic leftists [. . .] a notorious agent provocateur and seeder of dissension.”

  Rolling Stone had dispatched writers John Burks and Greil Marcus along with photographer Baron Wolman to cover the event. They arrived the night before and soon saw this outlaw impromptu happening was not going to be Woodstock West. Santana started playing at 10:00 am. As the group broke into their second song, an enormously fat man stripped off his clothing and began gyrating wildly amid the mass of people crushing in close to the stage. All at once, several Angels leaped forth, sawed-off pool cues in hand, and beat the naked kid into a bloody pulp. Jefferson Airplane were up next. When singer Marty Balin pleaded for sanity, he was coldcocked by an Angel and lay comatose on the stage as his band played “Somebody to Love.” Things were getting out of hand.

  The Grateful Dead had been scheduled to follow the Airplane but canceled at the last minute after the attack on Balin. The Flying Burrito Brothers took their place and played beautifully. Their set was interrupted by the roar of choppers when the Oakland Angels arrived and drove their bikes down through a crowd pressed as close together as rush hour commuters. Up next came Crosby, Stills and Nash, their delicate harmonies upset by the violence erupting around them. The Angels swilled beer and bashed at an overenthusiastic crowd attempting to clamber up onto a stage built too low for safety.